Moped, a Berlin startup that is ‘rethinking messages from the ground up’, has raised $1 million in seed funding from Germany’s Earlybird Ventures and high-profile U.S. investors like Lerer Ventures, SV Angel and Betaworks.

Still early in its development, Moped is building a private digital messaging service on the Web, desktop and smartphones – the company is launching its iPhone app today – that aims to eventually enable anyone to start conversations from anywhere, at any time, as long as they’re connected to the Internet.

“One idea, for example, is to make email better by building something on top of it. The other idea, what Moped is doing, is to start from scratch.”

Needless to say, that means Moped is still a little rough around the edges at this stage, and it probably will be for a while, but it’ll be interesting to see what else the startup comes up with in the future.